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Thoughts about 'Schlock!'

Schlock! Hannah Silva

Aldeburgh Poetry
Festival, November 2014

NB This isn't a review, more extensive dramaturgical thoughts on an early version of Hannah's show

‘How much pain are you willing to
experience?’ This is the question that weaves its way throughout Hanna Silva’s
supremely intense show, ‘Shlock!’, part spoken word and part performance. As
with everything in ‘Schlock!’, this question is heavy with double, triple,
quadruple meanings, all folding in on themselves. Primarily, it is a quotation
from ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and one of the terms listed in a sado-masochistic
sex-contract – but it is also the question an unborn son asks his mother, the
question a doctor asks a mother suffering from cancer and a question that
Hannah is really asking of the entire female race. It is also the question the
audience, exhausted and tingling with ideas, might be asking themselves after
this challenging, richly textured and acutely demanding performance.

The show begins with Hannah sat
on a near empty stage, eagerly biting and munching her text of ‘Fifty Shades of
Grey’. To the right of Hannah is a mountain of paper and ripped up books, with
a light glowing from below. Occasionally Hannah will walk over to this mound of
words and speak into the microphone above. Other times, she will sit at a table
above the torn pages - and it looks a little like she is giving birth to the
pages. Behind Hannah, sections of texts and random words – which are split up
and merged to form new words, ideas and sounds – flash up as Hannah speaks.

So, what might seem like a
relatively spare stage is already heaving with sub-text before Hannah has
barely begun her take down of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ – her angry, idealistic
and imploring exploration of the complicated and twisted relationship between
the female body and mind, pleasure and pain, free will and submission. Add to
this sections of poetry so taut and thick, you could practically munch on them
– and a number of fraught, arresting and often baffling sections involving a
pregnant mum who seems to only communicate through sign language and you will
get an idea of just how dense and thoughtful a show this is.

Back to that opening image.
Hannah munches down on a book, tears at the pages and smiles at the audience as
we all file in. She makes eye contact with us. She wants to like us and for us
to like her – and she is willing to experience some level of pain to achieve
that. At first, the show is near-impossible to figure out and it’s really just
a heavy cascade of words and images and flickers of meaning; a little like
reading through an unfamiliar collection of poetry for the first time, restless
and confused and unable to finish an entire poem, or even a thought.

Images and ideas flash from the
stage. An unborn boy talks to his pregnant mother and asks her how much pain
she is willing to take. Hannah reads extracts from ‘Shades of Grey’ and the female
protagonist’s compromised relationship with her body, the strange and disturbing
ways she is willing to physically turn against herself, emerge in fiery sparks.
We learn that the pregnant mother is called Kathy, who turns out to be a famous
feminist poet. Kathy discovers she has cancer and goes to hospital, where she
is peered at by male doctors – their flashlights piercing her eyes – and asked
to make a choice between someone else’s health and her own; asked to separate
her own physical needs from the needs of that other unborn boy, who is kicking
somewhere deep inside her stomach.

There are many moments when the
sheer volume of ideas and mode of delivery threatens to overwhelm. It feels
like Hannah is at an important juncture – somewhere very interesting but very
complicated in between performance and spoken word. She is a poet of quite
startling clarity – and part of me would have preferred to listen to her poems
and allowed them to wash over me; to have more space and time to allow Hannah’s
words to linger and to come to my own conclusions about where those words might
lead me.

However, Hannah is also a
talented performer – and acutely attuned to the double, triple, as many as you
bleeding like meanings that the stage affords. I have seen few performers
capable of loading a moment with such intensity of meaning and that is
something worth holding onto and nurturing – but I also think more variety is
needed and a little more understanding of the capacity and attention-span of
the ‘average’ (whatever that means) spectator. At the moment, ‘Shlock!’ feels
like a peculiarly intense poetry reading with some performance layered on top –
that makes for an exceptionally loaded combination. I think if Hannah took a
step back from her work, and really allowed her audience and words a little
more space to breath, the material would only deepen.

It is the less insistently
meaningful sections that feel most powerful. The scenes involving the pregnant
mother – who communicates mainly through sign language – were particularly
strong. At one point, the woman seems to be talking about the power of reading
– although frankly she could be talking about anything and there is real joy in
that, the freedom we have to make what we will of this woman’s private
thoughts. Anyway, it looks like she is talking about reading and she opens a
book and, with just her hands, creates a bird who flies from the pages and
flutters away. There is something about that flight, that possibility, that
will stay with me – and that seems far more of an indictment of ‘Fifty Shades
of Grey’, and all its literary and emotional limitations, than some of the
other more complex and word-filled criticisms levelled at the text.

There is another moment when Kathy,
told about her cancer, seems to beat at invisible walls that surround her.
Again, nothing is said here – but that uniquely compromised relationship
between a woman and her body is powerfully expressed. In another scene, Hannah
reads from the book with a tiny flashlight pointed at her face. It is like she
is being inspected, possibly even buried, by a force she cannot see.

There’s a whole other section in
which Kathy travels abroad to seek alternative treatment for her cancer that,
frankly, washed right over me. I would’ve got even more from this piece if
Hannah had tried to say a little less. But the vast range of methods that
Hannah has to express herself on stage is really quite something, as too is the
utter conviction of her performance. There are some sections that verged on
pretentious but Hannah’s belief in her performance stops you from laughing or
stepping outside the show. Perhaps that is what makes her fairly exhausting to
watch.

Hannah also has this strange ability
to fast forward through words, as if she is a ticker tape in vocal form. It is a
skill she used to brilliant effect throughout her past show,‘Opposition’. In ‘Schlock!’,
Hannah uses this skill just once. Our pregnant mother, Kathy, has just found
out about the cancer and the possible effect it might have on her and her baby.
Hannah rattles through the words – chemo, cancer, ca, c, c, c, c – and the
urgency of that speech, the way it judders ahead beyond Hannah’s control,
brilliantly evokes the uneasy relationship between a woman and her body and the
speed at which this control – this illusion of control - might be taken away.